Democrats and President BidenHarris have been pushing hard for the expansion of gun control laws in America as part of their “cure” for what they claim is an epidemic of “gun violence” in this country. Among other restrictions, they want to outlaw private gun sales, extend the number of days the FBI has to complete a check from three days to ten, and create incentives for every state to enact its own “red flag” confiscation law.
There’s just one problem with that. As two recent high profile shootings have shown, those laws, already on the books in California and Indiana, failed to keep guns out of the hands of some very dangerous and deranged people.
Aminadab Gaxiola Gonzalez, who lives in America’s gun control mecca, shot up an office building in Orange California last month. He’d been convicted of battery back in 2015. That should have prevented him from being able to legally purchase a firearm for at least a decade. And yet he was able to buy the gun he used to murder four people anyway in a state that prides itself on its extensive gun control regime. Oops.
As the Sacramento Bee reports . . .
It’s unclear where or how Gonzalez, 44, acquired the Glock semi-automatic handgun and ammunition used in the March 31 shooting in the city of Orange.
But the shooting raises concerns over California’s ability to enforce strict gun laws, and underscores the difficulty of the state’s efforts to seize weapons from those convicted of dangerous crimes.
Two weeks after the mass shooting, police have learned Gonzalez “was not on the “Prohibited Persons List,” though he might still have been blocked from buying a gun during a background check, according to Orange Police Lt. Jennifer Amat.
“Our detectives are still working on the trace for the weapon,” Amat said in an email this week.
Officials at the Department of Justice, which manages the state’s background check system, declined to answer questions about Gonzalez, saying the agency is forbidden by law from releasing information about a person’s criminal or firearms background-check history.
However, a department spokeswoman said Friday that just because someone isn’t listed on the state’s “Armed and Prohibited Persons System,” it doesn’t mean they can buy a gun with a previous conviction. That system only applies to gun owners who had previously purchased a firearm. State agents will use that database to seize weapons from those newly convicted of certain crimes.
But if gun buyers aren’t in that system, they can still be barred at a dealer if they try to purchase firearms through the standard background check process.
It seems that the byzantine combination of both California’s gun control bureaucracy and the FBI’s federal NICS system failed to keep a gun out of a convicted felon’s hands. Gonzalez wasn’t even in the state’s own prohibited persons data base.
If he’d tried to buy a gun legally, California would have had to hope that the federal NICS system was more up-to-date, an iffy proposition at best given its famous track record of failure (cough Devin Patrick Kelley cough Dylann Roof cough).
Exactly where or how Gonzalez got his gun, no one knows yet. Maybe he bought it legally and both background check systems failed. Or maybe Gonzalez bought the handgun he used on the street, skirting the elaborate and expensive processes erected to keep a gun out of his hands.
Maybe we’ll eventually find out where he got pistol. But in any case, it seems that someone bent on murder will find a way to get a gun no matter how many background check laws are on the books to keep him from doing so.
In other gun control news, there’s the case of Indianapolis FedEx killer Brandon Hole. As has already been reported, Hole’s family had reported him to police last year. They were worried that the former FedEx employee was a candidate for a suicide-by-cop situation. Both local police and the FBI investigated Hole and confiscated a shotgun he owned.
And yet Hole later purchased two rifles legally, one of which he used to murder eight people last week.
From the New York Times . . .
In March 2020, the police seized a shotgun from Mr. Hole after his mother raised concerns about his mental state, records show. But, Chief Randal Taylor said, the fact that Mr. Hole was legally able to make the more recent gun purchases indicated that — despite his mother’s warning and the police seizure of a gun — the authorities had not deemed him subject to Indiana’s so-called red flag law, which bars people from possessing a firearm if they are found by a judge to present a dangerous risk. …
Under Indiana’s red flag law, the authorities have two weeks after taking someone’s weapon to argue before a judge that the person is unstable and should be barred from possessing a gun for a period of time. Chief Taylor said he was unsure whether a hearing like that ever took place in the case of Mr. Hole, though the police never returned the shotgun they had seized last year.
“I don’t know how we held onto it,” Mr. Taylor said in an interview on Saturday night. “But it’s good that we did.”
Yes, a very good thing indeed. If they hadn’t taken it from him, the victims at the FedEx facility might have been murdered with a shotgun instead of a rifle.
In both high profile shootings — incidents that the civilian disarmament orgs, politicians, and the media (BIRM) are using to justify their push for more restrictions on responsible gun owners’ right to keep and bear arms — the very laws now advocated by members of Congress and the President were already in place. Yet they did virtually nothing to stop both men from getting their guns.
The truth is, the current drive for expanded gun control laws in America has nothing to do with stopping crime or saving lives. Rather, it has everything to do with erecting more hurdles and barriers to lawful gun ownership.
The more onerous and expensive the process of buying and owning a gun is, the fewer people will choose to do it…or so the thinking goes in the gun-grabbing community.
Criminals and the deranged, however, won’t be deterred. They never have been. They always manage to get the weapons they want.
If President BidenHarris and the Congress get their way, the only result of still more gun control laws on the books will be fewer responsible Americans with the ability to protect themselves and their families from those who would assault, rob, rape, or murder them.
Then again, if the bills become law, more politicians would be able to stand in front of the cameras to proudly announce they’ve DONE SOMETHING about “gun violence.” So…mission accomplished.